Three months ago we walked through a full audit of the sorting line at a client's canning facility outside Melbourne. The initial review flagged eleven points across the conveyor system, from sensor alignment on the optical sorters to the way rejected product was being recirculated back into the feed. Most of the findings were not surprising, but the follow-up visit last week showed which fixes actually held up under continuous production.

The clearest shift came from adjusting the air pressure on the ejection nozzles. During the first review, the sorters were rejecting about 4% of good product along with the defective pieces. The calibration work reduced that to under 1.5% without lowering the defect removal rate. That single change added roughly two tonnes of usable output per shift, which matters more than any software upgrade we discussed.

The second noticeable difference was in the packaging area. The original layout had the bagging station positioned too close to the metal detector, creating a bottleneck every time the line speed exceeded 90 bags per minute. We moved the detector upstream and added a short buffer conveyor between the weigher and the sealer. The operator no longer has to pause the line to clear jams, and the change cost less than a day of downtime to implement.

What did not change is worth mentioning too. The cleaning protocol between product runs is still taking longer than the schedule allows, and the team has not yet adopted the log sheet we proposed. That is not a machinery problem, but it will eventually show up as cross-contamination risk if left unaddressed. We are planning a shorter training session focused only on the rinse-down sequence rather than a full re-certification.

For anyone running a similar line, the takeaway is straightforward: review findings only matter if you revisit them under normal operating conditions. The initial audit gives you a list, but the second pass tells you which items were worth the effort. We are scheduling the next check for late June, and this time the client wants us to include the night shift in the walkthrough.